ext morning Bart
forgot his paper until afternoon, so eager was he to test the depth of
soil in the knoll.

I'm sending you a list of the wild things at hand. Will you tell me in
due course which of the ferns are best for our purpose? I've noticed
some of the larger ones turn quite shabby early in August.

VII

A SIMPLE ROSE GARDEN

(Barbara Campbell to Mary Penrose)

_Oaklands, June 5._ Yesterday my roses began to bloom. The very old bush
of thorny, half-double brier roses with petals of soft yellow crepe, in
which the sunbeams caught and glinted, took the lead as usual. Before
night enough Jacqueminot buds showed rich colour to justify my filling
the bowl on the greeting table, fringing it with sprays of the yellow
brier buds and wands of copper beech now in its velvety perfection of
youth. This morning, the moment that I crossed my bedroom threshold, the
Jacqueminot odour wafted up. Is there anything more like the incense of
praise to the flower lover? Not less individual than the voice of
friends, or the song of familiar birds, is the perfume of flowers to
those who live with them, and among roses none impress this
characteristic more poignantly than the crimson Jacqueminot and the
silver-pink La France, equally delicious and absolutely different.

As one who has learned by long and sometimes disastrous experience, to
one who is now really plunging headlong into the sea of garden
mysteries and undercurrents for the first time, I give you warning! if
you have a real rose garden, or, merely what Lavinia Cortright calls
hers, a rosary of assorted beads, try as far as possible to have all
your seed sowing and transplanting done before the June rose season
begins, that you may give yourself up to this one flower, heart, soul,
yes, and body also! It was no haphazard symbolist that, in troubadour
days, gave Love the rose for his own flower, for to be its real self the
rose demands all and must be all in all to its possessor.

As for you, Mary Penrose, who eschewed hen-keeping as a deceitful
masquerade of labour, under the name of rural employment, ponder deeply
before you have spade put to turf in your south lawn, and invest your
birthday dollars in the list of roses that at this very moment I am
preparing to send you, with all possible allurement of description to
egg you on. For unless you have very poor luck, which the slope of your
land, depth of soil, and your own pertinacity and staying qualities
dis